


miscellaneous

by stayseated



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, One Shot Collection, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2018-07-27 04:05:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7602727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stayseated/pseuds/stayseated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An ongoing collection of Grey Worm/Missandei one-shots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. After (post-canon)

**Author's Note:**

> (This first story is post-TV-canon.) 
> 
> After the end, Grey Worm has to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

 

 

 

It’s with a certain disillusionment — also a certain sense of resolution — that he decides to leave. He remembers how young he was — but at the time he felt very old — when he believed in killing all the masters. He now understands that peace is not brokered by simply removing those in power. Removing poison creates vacuums, a power imbalance — the scales invariably tip. And, he has found, the nature of people generally do not change.

He has found this to be especially true of himself.

He has lost his energy and his tolerance for such complexity in life, though. So he gathers some things — not even his things because he’s never had belongings, aside from one well-worn book — but some necessary and helpful things like a knife, clothing, currency that weighs heavy and strange in his sack.

When he told Tyrion he is leaving — though to be accurate, he actually told Tyrion he is no longer needed — Tyrion looked entirely nonplussed and unsurprised. Tyrion felt compelled to give a needlessly long speech about endings and new beginnings — wine swinging in hand — trailing off as he reminisced about a vineyard that doesn’t even exist.

And that was that — Grey Worm had fulfilled his duty.

 

 

Telling her that they will likely no longer see each other ever again is something that he dreads so much — he nearly avoids doing it entirely. But then he tells himself that sneaking off in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, more likely, without a word would deeply hurt her — and that horrible feeling he gets as a result just nags at him. He knows over time he’ll eventually come to really regret this, if he doesn’t force himself to say goodbye.

He keeps putting it off as his last days progress. It feels entirely too intimate and intrusive to knock on her door and talk to her in her room. She keeps passing him looks and small smiles whenever they are in each other’s presence, usually fleeting moments when she’s walking from one place to another with other people — after all, he has very little to do these days. He kind of yearns for the days when she was teaching him the Common Tongue — because they saw each other with scheduled regularity back then.

Just the memory of the lessons makes him feel horrible again.

 

 

He never gets the chance to tell her he is leaving. Tyrion actually unwittingly does so for him. And he learns of this when she confronts him with an angry face, as he is folding, unfolding, and refolding his one other shirt on his bed pad on the floor. He is still so unused to wearing this kind of garb. It makes him feel unprotected. He keeps trying to practice these routines and these motions — sometimes subconsciously — in order to prepare himself for the rest of life. He’s worried he’s making a grave mistake, that in leaving the imperfect life he has known for the unknown, he is stupidly unaware that the unknown is even worse than what he has known.

“You were not going to tell me,” she says, more as a statement than a question.

He doesn’t know what to say to that. It sometimes takes him a while to think through these sorts of things, before he can formulate responses. He says, “I planned to,” opting to just go with a simple truth.

Her face crumples a little bit, at that — at the confirmation that he is, indeed, leaving. And it makes him feel so bad. For a fleeting moment, he starts to consider staying just so she wouldn’t be sad.

 

 

He’s tense and uncomfortable — and his face goes hot and his fingers prickle and his heart pounds in his chest — when she sadly wonders out loud — why he didn’t ask her to leave with him? The implication of her quiet statement just kind of overwhelms him and makes him feel like he has no ground to stand on.

He wants to tell her that he has no right to ask such a thing of her — it feels so wrong and entirely unnatural to beholden her to him, given all of the things they have both left behind so purposefully.

“You would not have been making me,” she says. “You would have been asking me.”

He breaks eye contact to look at the ground, to look at his feet. He sees the light swish of the skirt of her dress and her toes. He says, “Do you . . . want to?”

 

 

Missandei likes that she has a certain knowledge base and a certain expertise in life on the outside — and in general, she does know more than he does. She has a better intuition about things. At the same time, he knows that she also likes to feel superior to him, in this small way. He doesn’t mind it. He likes the self-satisfied smile she gives to herself, whenever she correctly guesses something — simple things that even he could figure out — such as the procedure in paying for a meal at an inn.

The days are dauntingly long — and over the course of weeks, they also start to bleed together because there is a lack of schedule. Nevertheless, the days do adopt a kind of routine. He and Missandei tend to wake up around the same time — very early, sometimes before the sun comes up. They tend to open the doors to their rooms at the same time — with identical stunned looks on their faces when they see one another.

They tend to eat meals around the same time each day. And then then to go to the toilet around the same time each day. In the beginning, most of their time was spent discussing what they were going to fill the hours with — and there were so many open hours.

Money is not something they need to be concerned about. Tyrion carried over a number of Daenerys’ policies — thus, they were apparently back-paid for all their years as slaves — the concept of reparations continues to be a very troublesome issue for him — both in terms of understanding the logic of it — and also in terms of how history can so easily be altered, even erased — through such modest efforts. It sometimes makes his gut feel heavy — he can almost identity the feeling as bitterness. That’s what Missandei calls it — bitterness.

People tend to assume that he and Missandei are husband and wife — because they are traveling together. After he requests separate rooms so that the both of them are comfortable, then people shift and assume that they are brother and sister.

He’s afraid to ask Missandei how long she plans on staying around with him, how long before she tires of this aimlessness and wants to either go back to King’s Landing and back to the life they both used to know — or how long before she simply wants to strike out on her own. He really has nothing to offer her that she cannot get herself.

 

 

She takes another sip from her cup, and he thinks to himself that she is drinking too much. He knows she is drinking too much because she is being . . . different. She keeps glancing at him — and then stealing her eyes away when he catches her looking at him. He has asked her what she’s looking at — which somehow managed to embarrass her. Since then, he has tried to ignore her bizarre mood, thinking that it’s judicious to not continually point out that she is being very odd.

“Do you remember the first time?” she asks him, with her voice low, with shadows flickering over her features.

Her question is so vague, but his stomach flip-flops all the same. She could be referring to any number of things. And he’s so uncomfortable with where this conversation seems to be going that he doesn’t know how to ask the right clarifying question.

As if reading his mind, she laughs, exposing her throat. And she says, “The first time we drank.” And she keeps laughing at him — knowingly, in a targeted way. “What did you think I was referring to?”

He shakes his head quickly. He’s amused now, too.

 

 

Her room is next to his, so it’s become a routine, for them to retire at the same time — to linger at their doors for a few minutes before saying goodnight. He wonders how long they will carry on like this. He’s prone to thinking of milestones — good or bad — it’s how he was trained. He tends to seek out momentum and progress — in all the complicated ways that progress can be measured. He also wonders if they should just pick a place to settle down in — someplace more permanent.

That’s presumptuous. He doesn’t even know if she would want that at all.

“I’m not going to feel very good tomorrow,” she says quietly, smiling at him as she leans against her door. “I hope it is not too sunny and hot. That will not help with the headache.”

“We do not have to go outside,” he says lightly.

“Oh.”

He doesn’t know what he did or what he said — to make the mood shift — but it does. She gets very quiet all of sudden — and she looks at him with a certain . . . intensity, like she’s trying to figure out something. It makes him nervous. And he knows that he’s not complex. He’s very simple. There’s nothing to figure out, so she must be looking for an entirely different reason.

He nearly jumps a bit — and that fact is shameful because it goes against everything he’s been taught or knows about himself — when he feels the delicate bones in her hand, her knuckles, brush up against his skin. Again — his heart is lodged in his throat. He tells himself it’s because this is so strange and she has been drinking and she is not herself. He tries to parse out the mechanics of what is going on — all the while, he knows he is getting distracted.

Her smile is with a closed mouth and pursed lips. She lightly pinches his hand in between her thumb and forefinger, as she says, “Good night.”

 

 

He cannot sleep. He lies awake in the dark, as his body slowly ekes out sweat, as his heart just continues to pound in anxiety, fear, and something else.

 

 

She tells him she doesn’t want to go home — because there is no home left to go to. He essentially feels the same way. But they do settle on a middle ground — on a sleepy coastal town with a very small number of people. They are rarely bothered, but they do stick out as outsiders. It doesn’t matter to him — it matters more to her. But she also tells him she’s fairly content with the little fertile patch of land in the front of the small house. She’s never gardened before. Growing has never been anything she’s been interested in. But — she tells him — that could very well be because she had never been given the option.

She reads at night, by the firelight. She actually reads constantly — she reads and rereads all of the books that they have. She’ll always be in the habit of correcting how he says things at times, the habit of teaching him new vocabulary.

She keeps trying to find words to describe what they are to each other. He has told her that they are friends. It’s simple. To him, the matter is closed. The nuanced distinctions are unnecessary to voice. Of course they are more than friends. But it doesn’t matter to him how that is articulated.

 

 

He always leaves the house to give her privacy whenever she starts to change out of her clothes. She always starts to change out of her clothes without announcement or preamble — because she has reached a certain level of comfort with him. That’s what she’s told him.

The house is also very small, with only one bed. He sleeps on the floor on a blanket. They’ve argued about this. She insists that they switch off, but he tells her that after years of sleeping on the hard ground, it doesn’t even register to him anymore. That’s a lie — and it’s one that she easily picks out. But it’s not a fight that she’s been able to win yet.

 

 

He kisses her again simply because she asked him to. And he’s been thinking about it. He’s actually been thinking about it a lot. Constantly, actually. Constantly since the first time it happened.

The first time he was in such pain and so out of sorts — that for a long time after, he had convinced himself he had dreamt it or he had imagined it. They also didn’t speak about it at all. It took him a while to figure out that it was real and it had happened. And he told himself that all sorts of strange things happen sometimes.

This time, it started because he had pointed to a crocus on the ground — a purple and yellow flower — and she planted it on purpose. She told him it was going to be ornamental and useless and just beautiful. And — not knowing the lifespan or schedule of this kind of thing because it’s her very first time — she spent weeks looking at the ground, trying to see if anything was growing. She became discouraged after two weeks. She may have forgotten about it — or she just gave up — after four.

So when he saw a bit of purple protruding from the ground — he laughed out loud. He almost stepped on it carelessly, too. And then he called out her name. It sent her into a panic because he was being so loud — she thought something was wrong.

She had hit him, when he pointed to the flower. She told him that he scared her so badly.

He had instinctively reached out to hold her hand — before he laughed out an apology. He told her he didn’t mean to scare her. And then she asked him if he would please kiss her.

 

 

He holds her tightly at night — maybe too tightly because he’s always afraid he’d suffocate her, snuff out the bright light from inside of her. She tells him she doesn’t mind it — as she presses her face deeper into his chest. She tells him he smells nice. He feels her listening to his erratic heartbeat — it makes him self-conscious — but she’s admirably calm about it. She acts like it’s all normal.

He’s been thinking a lot about things — all sorts of complicated things. Things that he tries to push to the back of his mind so he can just focus on the here and the now — just like she told him to.

“I was so sad when I thought you were leaving me,” she says, her voice muffled by his chest. “I thought I would never see you again.”

“I was sad also,” he says. “I thought — it would be very hard — painful — to not see you again.”

 

 

They start fighting when he bluntly tells her that they aren’t married and they can’t ever be married. He tells her she’s too wrapped up in terms and definitions.

It’s the very first time she’s been so angry with him and the very first time he feels anger back toward her. It’s disorienting and it’s unsteady and he feels horrible. He hates this feeling and he just wants for it to stop. It’s all going so fast — her voice. She is speaking so quickly and saying so many things that it makes him dizzy. He has a hard time handling the instability, so he leaves when she’s in the middle of shouting at him — he walks out of the house and shuts the door harshly behind him.

He doesn’t go far — he knows better than that. She can still see him through the window. But he just needs the space. It’s claustrophobic to constantly be around someone all the time. Even someone like her, someone that he does not want to live without.

But he is limited in what he can give her. It’s this fact that they keep sidestepping and pretending doesn’t exist. He cannot give her a child. He cannot give her children. That is the entirety of him. That is his existence. This is who he is. Therefore, they are not married, and they can’t ever be married. The concept and the set-up is very straightforward. He doesn’t understand why she can’t just accept the limitations — his limitations. He doesn’t understand why she insists on making him feel worse than he already does about it.

 

 

She asks him if he knows what love is.

He’s still upset, so he snaps at her and he tells her he’s not an idiot. Of course he knows what love is.

She cries — a little bit. He hates himself. And he feels like it’s the end — even as he knows she’s misguidedly devoted to him. He reaches out to hold her cheek, damp and cold from the tear tracks. She tells him she’s sorry for pushing him. He tells her that he’s so sorry for all the things he cannot be. She tells him it’s a choice. They both have the right to make choices now. That’s important. And what is also important is that they keep choosing one another.

 

 

He’s feels very tense, when she shuts the door before he can escape behind it, when she leans against it, blocking his way out.

And the tension does not leave his body as she starts taking off her clothes — even as he averts his eyes and asks her what she thinks she’s doing.

“I want you to see me.”

“I do see you,” he says quietly. “I see you every day.” He means that he sees her in his dreams — when he closes his eyes — when he lets his mind drift aimlessly.

But she takes it to mean something else.

 

 

This is an impossible thing. It’s what he has told himself — again and again and again. It’s what he keeps drowning himself in — again and again and again. It’s just an impossible and unfortunate circumstance — that he has this heart, a man’s heart.

He transparently tells her she’s so beautiful to him — just so beautiful like no other. He tells her that he feels these things for her — things that are impossible — as she lies her naked body down next to him on the bed.

Her voice is breathy and soft, as she tells him that he can touch her — that she actually really wants for him to touch her. She tells him that she knows how he feels about her — she’s has a certainty about it that fortifies her and makes her confident. She tells him that she really loves him — all of him.

The touches start off innocent and exploratory. They progress much like the kissing did — first just chaste skin-to-skin presses — just the tips of his finger running down her ribcage, a place that is not usually exposed to him. Just like with the kissing, he takes his time — and he carefully avoids certain areas for a while.

And just as the simple kissing eventually reached capacity — when it wasn’t enough anymore — it takes him some courage — a different kind of fearlessness — to brush his palm over her soft, soft breast. Her nipple tightens and puckers — this heady, and amazing thing — and she lightly gasps and grabs his hand, keeping it on her body.

 

 

She’s entirely naked — he’s not quite entirely naked. He’s drawing the constellations on her bare back, in the morning light — as she laughs at him and coyly asks him — again — why the Unsullied went to brothels. He doesn’t answer her directly — it’s become a running joke, a riddle of sorts, with the answer always shifting, depending on how clever he is, depending on his mood.

He thinks about the ambiguous shadow that looms over his early life. He thinks about the light that came with Daenerys. He thinks about youthful idealism. And he thinks about the moderate middle ground he’s come to exist in — with her. And he thinks about how he really accidentally stumbled on this life and this happiness.

 

 

He can feel her watching him, as he walks over to craggy rocks, his back to her. He unties and loosens his pants and relieves himself onto some of the dark stones.

Earlier on, she had asked him how it all works — at first embarrassed by her bold question. And he had grinned in amusement, because he had known what her real question was, before telling her that it works like it does on any other man. For the most part. With perhaps just a very minor deviation.

Her response was wide eyes. Eyes armed with new knowledge. And hungry.

 

 

It takes time — just like it has with everything else. He has never known anything grand and worthwhile to be instantaneous. He starts off very rigid and tense, the first time he lets her fully divest him of his clothes. What ends up helping matters is her intuition and her kindness — he can never fully believe that it’s genuine and that it’s natural — the way she takes the peculiarities of his body in stride. He can’t believe that any woman would not have the instinct to cower or to run. Women only have varying degrees in how well they can hide their aversion.

She keeps telling him he’s wrong. She keeps telling him she loves him. He keeps agreeing with her — he knows she loves him — and he also keeps correcting her. He tells her that he knows she loves him as a person — which is a miracle. He knows she loves him for who he is.

He flinched and almost instinctively hurt himself — and her — the first time she kissed him down there, the first time she told him that she actually also loves him in an impure way, running her hands up and down his nakedness.

Over time — it becomes more comfortable. Over time — it becomes second nature. She keeps hovering over scar tissue, asking him what he can feel, asking him how it feels, asking him to what degree it feels.

 

 

They need to buy new wares — his favorite clay pot broke in the fire the night before, burning their dinner. They have to go into town because they are both really hungry. He, in particular, is irritated that he no longer has his favorite clay pot. He will never find another like it. She tells him he’s pessimistic — that it’s possible and probable, that he will find another vessel that he likes just as much.

She clasps onto his hand and leads him down alleyways, weaving in and out of stalls — even though these are well-worn paths for the both of them. He holds onto her tightly, dragging his feet at times as he takes in the scenery.

 

 

 


	2. Drunk (canon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More jokes. More drinks. Canon-y.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post 6x08, in some vague lull in time where shit isn’t so chaotic in Meereen. Or we can all just pretend the slavers’ ships totally didn’t interrupted the most heart-crushing smile ever.

 

 

 

“I have a better one,” she says, her cheeks warm from wine, the very lovely, lovely wine — perhaps she should have taken Tyrion up on his offer, sit a bit longer after dinner for another tipple. She ended up declining another because he had stood up and announced that he was retiring. His patience for Tyrion’s tendency for frivolity varies from day to day, but it generally never deviates far from bare tolerance.

She had wanted to talk to him a bit before he disappeared into the communal chambers with other Unsullied to sleep.

She trails slightly behind him in the darkened corridor, watching her steps over the stonework of the floor. Her hands hesitantly reach out at times to touch the wall next to her, so she can regain her balance. Their pace is slow — maybe perhaps leisurely — he is purposely taking small strides so he doesn’t get too far ahead of her.

She clears her throat, to quell the giggles that threaten to spill over whenever she thinks about the punchline of her new joke. “Ready?” She doesn’t wait for his response. He usually doesn’t respond to her rhetorical questions. “If I have three dictionaries in my right hand and five atlases in my left hand — what do I have?”

Before he can answer her, she spontaneously trips over bump in the floor. Her hands go flying, reaching out to find purchase on something, anything — to stop herself from falling all the way to the ground.

The momentum stops, with his calloused hand squeezing hard on her bicep. His face is looming close to hers — ducked down as he caught her, but shadowed so she can’t make out his features clearly. She can see the hollow of where his eyes are supposed to be — she can sense his presence through his breathing more than she can see him.

She supposes that he can’t see her that well in the dark, either. He can’t see her grateful smile.

In Valyrian, he mutters to himself that this hallway is too dark, and he’s been meaning to rectify it. He says it with a grumble of annoyance — bothered that he has procrastinated. Then in the Common Tongue, he says, “You drink too much.”

It’s something she takes offense to — his disapproval.

She pulls her arm out of his grasp. The thick air between them becomes awkward as she pushes herself off the wall and regains her balance. She says nothing — she just applies more concentration on walking and on doing it in a perfectly serviceable way so he has nothing else to possibly be irritable about.

“Eight books,” he says after a slight pause.

“Hm?” she says.

“The answer to your joke,” he says, his voice a low rumble as they turn the corner, both squinting their eyes slightly as they see the flood of golden firelight. “You ask what you have, five dictionaries, three atlases. Answer is eight books.”

A short laugh sneaks out from her mouth, before her hand can get to her lips, before her palm can press the sound back down her throat. He is so literal, and it is so amusing. He looks momentarily surprised by her response — his shoulders straight and rigid — before he allows himself to relax. She watches as his expression softens, as their surroundings become a little fuzzy. She still has her hand clamped over her mouth — her eyes are shiny and giving away her amusement. She knows it.

And she watches a grin slowly morph his face from somber and grave to this expression of pleased thoughtfulness — and its warmth makes the temperature in her body tick up, makes her heart in her chest seized up a little bit.

She remembers wine making her feel strange — but never like this before. Even long before Daenerys had disappeared, Missandei has been too reticent and restrained, perhaps too embarrassed, to burden the queen with her silly questions about these matters. Of course the growing fear, restlessness, and insurgencies within Meereen took precedence over such trivial thoughts. And all the previous times the subject has been broached had been by Daenerys, who brought it up only when there was a lull in activity and she was mentally unoccupied.

Missandei remembers combing through the libraries in the pyramid, after Meereen was taken. She took it upon herself to learn the vast history and culture of the city — the logic being, how can the queen rule over a city without knowing the lifeblood that pumps through it? Similarly, how can Missandei properly advise the queen without a breadth of context and information? That is her usefulness, certainly — her ability to quietly absorb information, whether through years of quiet observation or through hours of thumbing through pages.

“It’s not right,” he says to her, with the corners of his mouth twitching. “My answer to joke.”

He’s so quick and so intelligent. He has picked up a new language so stunningly fast. He keeps learning on his own. It’s something that constantly amazes her, and something she has to moderate her enthusiasm over. It makes him uncomfortable when she gets too excited over his progress.

Here and now though, she cannot even contain this feeling. She says, “It’s not,” reluctantly. “But I like yours better.” She feels like another fit of laughter is going to overtake her again. She says, “You’re funny.”

He kind of straightens up — perhaps in pride — as he keeps struggling at trying to break down his smile. He had said that he knows what jokes are, when she tried to explain them to him. She wonders how many he has told — what he is like when he is around other Unsullied and they are going through a long calm, where it’s just routine patrols day in and day out. It can’t possibly be austere and businesslike all the time. They must pass the time at least a little bit every now and then, talking about errant things. There are names that he refers to a lot, when he talks to her. There are those he favors over others because he finds them pleasant and easy to direct. They must have a working concept of friendship and camaraderie.

That’s another one of those things she would have to muster up a bit of courage to ask.

As for now, she’s not ready for this night to end, and she has saved up most of her bravery for this:

“Do you want to come sit in my room and talk for a bit longer?”

 

 

  
She’s still emotionally getting used to the concept of having possessions. She’s always understood it intellectually — she, of course, has observed the Good Masters covet their possessions tightly — violently. And for this reason, the idea of ownership is one that has made her uneasy and tense. Why hide something away for just one’s self when it can be freely shared? Books can be lent and circulated so that many people can possess the same knowledge. Clothes can trickle down and be given to little ones after elders have outgrown them. Why not simply ask a person something instead of forcing them? For instance, she asked him to be here. She’s not making him. She’s not keeping him. He isn’t hers. He can leave when he wants to.

He looks like he wants to leave. He’s hovering on the outer edges of the room, near the walls, looking uncomfortable and tense. He’s never been in her room at night before. He’s never been in her room with the door locked — she locked it out of habit. He’s never been in her room without the task of learning ahead of them.

She sits on the edge of her bed, on the mattress with her feet dangling off. Her sandals are still on. Usually she likes to be barefoot in her room. Usually her nights are spent curled up in bed for a few hours reading by candlelight. There is a stack of books on the floor next to her bed — books she had specifically picked out — interesting ones. Ones that likely will not help the queen at all. She found books about seafaring adventurers going to distant lands. And she found a few books — not on the shelves — but well-worn pages tucked in desk — about people. About men and women.

“You said you want to talk. There’s no talk now.” He sounds uncharacteristically agitated. “Why did you ask me to talk and there’s no talk?”

Not that she hasn’t seen him agitated. She’s seen him like this a lot, actually. But only directed, with great frequency, at Tyrion. He rarely takes up this tone with her. It must be the change in location — it’s relative intimacy. Usually, they spend hours weaving in and out of corridors in the pyramid, as he recites the details of the previous day’s patrols to her. It’s usually all very much the same, but she likes the smooth sound of his voice. She is also the only one he can practice the Common Tongue with the most.

After going over patrol, they usually transition into just conversation. They talk about little things they have observed, perhaps their thoughts on these things. For a while now, a lot of their conversations have been dominated by the shortsightedness of Tyrion’s concessions.

“What do you want to talk about?” she says, leaning back on her arms and hands, relaxing and reclining a little bit.

His eye flick down to her body for a quick moment — just a flash that she would have missed if she hadn’t been watching him so intently. In the past — such a look from a man made her want to hide and squeeze her body into nothingness. Certain fears from childhood have become ingrained and permanent fixtures in adulthood. He has become the exception to her — a fact that Daenerys first attributed to his cut status — something that Missandei has turned over and over in her mind before deciding that that wasn’t it. That’s not the reason it feels different. That’s not the reason he doesn’t draw out fear from her.

He turns his face — he is upset with himself — so that it’s oriented at the far wall. “Maybe I will go,” he says. “There is nothing to talk.”

“No, no,” she says, her heart beating furiously in a lurching panic. She straightens up and holds her body upright again. It seems to help him be more at ease. “Don’t leave. Please,” she says, aware of how pleading her voice sounds. “Please just stay for a little bit.”

“What is real answer to your joke?”

She raises her brows. “Hm?”

“Five dictionaries and three atlases,” he says, prompting her.

“Oh!” She perks up. “If I have five dictionaries in my right hand and three atlases in my left hand, then I have some really big hands.” She raises up her hands to show him — they actually aren’t abnormally big. But that is the joke! Her body starts shaking with the giggles, as she wiggles her fingers up in the air.

He’s smiling again, shaking his head in disbelief. “You are so bad at jokes,” he says.

“I’m not!” she insists. “You just don’t know what a good joke sounds like.”

He shrugs, leaning his shoulders against the wall, bracing his body weight against it.

A particular hidden book that she found — and she’s spent a lot of hours trying to imagine who the previous owner of the book was, or who the book’s writer was — was this short bit that she could have read in one sitting.

It was confusing at first — the language rough and casual, like how they speak, instead of how words are supposed to be written — and when she got to the drawings — of naked people — her face turned to fire and she promptly slammed the book shut. She suddenly knew what it was, and she was shocked. She was shocked, not that such a thing existed — she knows that these things exist because she’s not so naive — but that it existed amid all of the real books, the anthologies of history and geography and culture.

She had tucked the book in a flap of her dress — she was so embarrassed by its contents that she was scared someone she knew would stop her on the way to her room and would ask her what kind of book she was reading.

She could’ve finished the book in a few hours, but she spread it out over the course of weeks. She read only a dozen or so pages a night, with her face sweating and her heart slamming from disbelief and fear and uncertainty and also in illumination.

She couldn’t disregard the book as trash because it kind of put to name — with stunning accuracy — a lot of the feelings she had inside of her. About him. Sometimes she felt horrible — about him — a sense of dread that extended far beyond empathy. It felt like a sickness, deep inside. The book taught her that she had qualified it correctly. It _was_ a sickness, a heart sickness. The feeling inside of her is one of want. And of regret. And of fear. She wants him — in ways that are pointless and wrong. She regrets that she now knows this about herself. She fears losing him forever — in all the ways that are within and outside of her control. It’s a fear that eclipses all else sometimes.

She often thinks to how she learned that Sir Barristan had died — matter-of-factly told the situation — and how it wracked her with fear and guilt. She didn’t wait a second before she baldly inquired about Grey Worm, diminishing what had happened to Sir Barristan because she was so blinded by the bleak prospect of having to go on living by herself, alone once again. She disrespected a man that treated her very kindly because of her feelings for another.

She kept reading the book because she had to know — what it all means — and how it all ends — and if it ever stops. When she got to the last page — she had no clear answers. Really, she only had more questions. There is lingering ambiguity. There are so many impossible things in her head.

She pats the bit of mattress next to her. She says, “Do you want to sit? Here?”

He’s unsure, and he’s conflicted. It’s plain on his face. It makes something heavy drop to the bottom of her stomach. She feels vulnerable and foolish. In spite of her reputation and her proficiency in languages, she finds she has a harder time articulating these things clearly — even in comparison to him — especially in comparison to him sometimes. She can’t help but talk around things, skirt around what her real desires and her real questions are. She still doesn’t feel like she should be allowed to ask for or want certain things. There are still certain concepts that are too far out of reach.

She brushes the fabric on the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles as she blinks the water back into her eyes, before they can fall down her face. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re right. It’s inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate,” he repeats, slowly rolling over the syllables.

“It means it’s not proper or unsuitable.”

“I know what inappropriate is,” he says quickly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Why is it inappropriate? We sit together before.”

Partly because of how he feels about her. And to a greater extent, because of how she keeps feeling about him. The answer just pops into her mind right away, but she says nothing. She just smiles at him again — at his truthful outspokenness. She’s glad for it.

She’s surprised, pleasantly so, when he crosses the short distance, from the closed door to her bed, and carefully situates himself next to her — putting a solid amount of space in between them. He sighs, folding his hands over his lap, his longer legs splayed out in front, braced against the floor. He fidgets a little bit — an unexpected but not unpleasant look on him — trying to get comfortable. He mutters that it’s too soft, as he shifts his weight around. After another sigh, he says, “I don’t understand why you say we will talk and I come here and we don’t talk.”

Her skin just feels alive. And she decides that she will later blame this on the wine, if she has to. She leans over as she reaches up to touch his cheek, as she turns his face and orients it toward hers. Her heart is slamming in her throat, and she can barely breathe — she’s so anxious and nervous, but he is so pleasant and so close — and she slants her mouth over his and kisses him.

 

 

  
The last and first time she kissed him had been a kind of mimicry. It had been a reflection of what she had imagined and what she had seen other people do — the press of lips to lips. It was all she could do to express gratitude in the moment. She was so grateful that he had been spared and that he wasn’t taken from her. That kiss came on the heels of long, exhausting hours — days — filled with tension and uncertainty, spent in silence, sitting next to his bed, willing him to wake up. Beyond scant moments when the queen appeared at his bedside and the maesters cleaned his wounds and changed his dressings — she didn’t have anyone to speak to.

So she talked to him — the unconscious version of him. She talked for both of them — providing his responses to her thoughts and her questions. Certain versions of him from her head were cruel and unkind, perhaps to make it easier on her, in the event that she had to let him go. Other versions of him from her head were so painfully perfect and ideal — he made all the right promises and said all of the things she still wanted to hear from him — that it made her ache inside, at the loss.

She felt she had to kiss him — when he woke up and took it upon himself to say all of the right things to her. She couldn’t make herself tell him she had been so terrified of never seeing him again also — so she kissed him. And she didn’t know when to breathe — if she should breathe. She didn’t know how he felt — if he was upset over it. She worried about his physical pain. She thought back to that awkward moment when one of the maesters gave her a scrutinizing look of disapproval and shooed her from the room — she hadn’t meant to linger, but she was lost in her emotions — and the maester told her it was inappropriate, as he lightly lifted the blanket covering Grey Worm’s unconscious body, shielding it from her view. The maester told her that her presence was inappropriate, unnecessary, and not helpful to Grey Worm’s healing. She was acting like a wife.

The condemnation was so upsetting — she had no idea that that was how things appeared. Later she cried a little bit over that in the privacy of her room.

For days afterward, she felt uncomfortable in her own body, sitting next to him. She’d stiffen every time someone came in the room, steeling herself for their judgement. She hated herself, whenever her eyes lingered on his body — and they did — during the long hours she spent there. She’d catch herself wondering and thinking. And then she felt deep shame over it. That’s the pain and the sickness inside of her. It is wrong, but she cannot make herself stop.

For a moment — in that first kiss — she forgot, so overcome she was by gratitude.

She broke the kiss when the doubts and the fears and the shame crept back into her mind. She pulled back from his face, looked into his pensive eyes, and apologized to him. She told him she didn’t know what came over her — that it was an accident and she wasn’t thinking. She told him she didn’t mean to do that to him.

She also regretted that. She regrets her cowardice. Sometimes it seems like she regrets everything and there’s nothing for her to take pride and ownership in — again, these ephemeral concepts that make sense on paper, but never in practice.

He is non-responsive — just frozen. His mouth is very soft, in contrast to her general impression of the rest of his body and who he is. He is holding his breath. And when she pulls back and away — she can almost feel the coiled tension, and she sees him staring at her. His brows are slightly furrowed — he must be confused. He must be wondering why. She has to give him answers.

She says, “I meant it. I _mean_ it. So much.” She licks her lips and reaches up again to touch his face with her fingers — his chin now, sliding along his jawline before she cups his cheek. She sees and feels his jaw clench and unclench. She sees his eyes darting around the room unconsciously, as thoughts that he keeps hidden from her flicker behind them.

He sighs again — a breathy, heavy, weary sound as his entire body slumps, starting at the shoulders. He shifts around on the bed so that he can face her, jostling her hand off his face. His eyelids are low and tired-looking. He’s still conflicted — he’s thinking about a lot. His gaze is oriented down.

She’s standing firm. She’s not going to lie to him again out of fear or other external factors. She may be wrong, but sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it matters at all. Sometimes in her heart, it doesn’t feel like it’s even something that she should care about at all.

She nearly jumps out of her skin when she feels his rough hands gently touching her face — holding it. He looks utterly defeated, his eyes are dark and soft — as he pulls her face to his and he pushes his mouth against hers — open, warm, damp.

She feels — she hears — herself gasping in the space at the newness, as her face breaks out into tears — all over — tears in her eyes, in her skin in the form of sweat — and she can’t hold her breath at all — her body will not let her. So she breathes hard into his mouth, as he runs his lips over hers, as a deep and dark and needy sound creeps out from in between them, as she blindly and uncaringly grabs onto him harshly, pulling his body against hers harshly.

She thinks _yes_ to herself. This weighty feeling of victory just burns through her — and is this supposed to be how this feels? Is it always going to feel like this?

It’s unclear what is happening or how it’s happening — whether it’s him pushing or her pulling — but her back softly hits the bed. The momentum briefly puts all of his bodyweight on top of hers. She moans against his mouth — left wanting — when he lifts up a little bit. She tries to speak — she tries to tell him to just lie on top of her because she wants him to — but her open mouth and the words get swallowed up. She accidentally touches her tongue against his lips. His response to that — his grunt and the way his fingers dig hard into the flesh on her neck and shoulders — she knows.

There is no going back from this. If she is wrong, then she will never be right again.

“Smile for me,” she says softly when she pulls apart for a break, getting just incrementally and impossibly closer to him, her fingers grazing over his cheek and his mouth. He does as she asked, his expression soft and calm. She gently pushes the tip of her forefinger into the divot on his cheek that his smile creates. She says, “I like this so much.” She means the dimple. She also means the smiles. She mostly means him.

He grabs her finger, encases it in his warm fist. He softly says, “I like it too much.”

Against his mouth, she says, “That’s good.”

 

 

 

 


	3. Dreamscape (alt-canon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei wakes up one morning and finds that nothing is as it should be

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of my favorite tropes! Set in canon-times, but alt-u canon. No specific timeline, but def sometime after when our boos start exchanging all of the tortured smoldering looks with each other.

 

 

The offering was brought to light so matter of factly, that it took a moment for Daenerys’ statement to sink in, before Missandei’s eyes widened and her brain frantically started buzzing in anxiety, trying to find the words to _get out of this._ She doesn’t want to seem rude — so with her heart pounding in her chest, her voice sounding so far away, she softly says, “Excuse me, your grace, I don’t understand?” the end of it lilting into confusion.

Daenerys’ smile is serene, but also enigmatic and calculated — hiding more thoughts and opinions than she will voice out loud.

 

 

  
Missandei walks all over the dark grounds of the pyramid, searching for him. It’s half an hour before she finds him, standing stiffly with his hands clasped behind his back, with his gaze blank and cast forward to the dark horizon.

He ignores her at first, so intent he is on pretending that he didn’t hear her come up.

She clears her throat, and that does garner his watchful eyes, scanning their immediate vicinity before they sweep on her. He turns his body around to face her, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Al Hakim voiced his intent,” she blurts out to him. “For me.” She unconsciously flutters her lashes in nervousness, wringing her hands together in front of the skirt of her dress. She’s leaning forward so much that she might topple over, trying to catch the truth of his feelings on his face. She’s unsure of what he will say. He actually looks resolved on saying nothing. “Al Hakim said he wants to spend more time getting to know each other,” she adds, with an inordinate amount of emotion in her voice. “The queen said I’m at the age where this sort of thing happens.”

Technically, Daenerys good-humoredly warned her that Al Hakim would likely not be the first suitor who will want to get close to Missandei — Missandei not only being in a position of power as the queen’s closest advisor — but also because she is beautiful. It was a statement — a concept — that caused Missandei to flinch. She had asked Daenerys what she should do, how she should proceed with this. She doesn’t want to cause offense, but she is still stunned. She has only exchanged bland greetings with Al Hakim and that was it. How can that be the basis of this development?

Daenerys had told Missandei that it is ultimately her choice — how she wants to proceed. Daenerys also murmured about how she didn’t have a choice when she was given to Khal Drogo — pulling in a tired breath — but it went well because it became love — but then he died.

“So you let yourself be sold. Like slave.” His voice is hard. Condemning.

It hits her in the face — the very first feeling is just oppressive shame, overriding everything. And then her brain catches up — and that is when this deep anger flares. His insinuation is ugly and it is unkind.

She glowers at him. She says, “How _dare you_ say that to me.”

His body is rigid and straight — aggression just radiating off of it. “Why come here and tell me?” he demands. “I already escorted him here this morning. Now you stand there and —” He breaks it off, shutting his mouth, shaking his head, tilting it at the moon.

“I want to be with you,” she says, with tears blurring her eyes. It’s the very time first she’s ever articulated such a thing to him.

And he laughs — cruelly. He says, “Who am I? I am nothing. I’m not a man. So go. Go be with him.”

 

 

  
She resisted pushing him off the damn ledge to his death because she knows that she will regret it and she will miss him, once her rage dissipates. Their conversation went nowhere — it just got more contentious and heated the longer it went on. She was keen on carrying on until he finally submitted and admitted to her that he is a stubborn ass and he is an idiot and he is wrong. But he didn’t do that. He just shamed her more — he apparently has a great talent for that that she has missed — telling her that she was distracting him from patrol and if someone got hurt on his watch, it will also be on her. After that, there was nothing else for her to do but to stop herself from spitting in his face — and then leave.

Her pillow is becoming wet with her stupid, pointless young girl’s tears. She tries to shove her mind to some other place, so that she doesn’t have to think about him and this. At first she tries to think of happy things, but it’s no use when she is so emotional like this. So she tries to think of horrible things — losing her family, getting taken, being forced to do things she didn’t want to do — to distract her from this stupid pain.

He’s not wrong, either. That is the problem. Her head knows that he’s not wrong, but she just cannot stop wanting what she’s not meant to have.

 

 

  
Her eyes fly open when she feels herself being moved around and touched while she is asleep. Her heart is ramming itself up her throat and her teeth clench down on a desperate grunt as her hand balls up into a fist and she blindly punches at her attacker.

She knows it’s not her imagination when her knuckles slam into skin and bone and muscle — a shoulder — and then she screams — she gets one loud one in before a hand tightly clamps down over her mouth — tears break out in her eyes and as she starts clawing at the hand on her face — thrashing, kicking out her legs and trying to roll over so she can get to her knees and then her feet — but hot dread and panic just floods into her when a heavy, warm weight settles on top of her. She screams again — sweating and crying — as the sound comes out muffled.

“Missandei,” a male voice says — familiar. “Missandei, wake up,” he says. “It’s me. It’s me.”

Her eyes widen — blinking rapidly to see past the tears. She sees his concerned face looking down at her, gently lit by the red rising sun. He lifts his hand off her mouth — she immediately sucks in a cool breath of air.

He quietly says, “Were you having a bad dream? I’m sorry I scared you. I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to wake you up a little bit so that I can say bye.”

He’s suddenly so conversational and fluent — how? It’s her very first thought, as she stares back into his hovering face, now soft and smiling down at her.

“Where are you going?” she says blearily.

He lightly laughs — for a reason that is completely lost to her. He says, “For Tyrion’s training. Remember? How could you forget? You keep disparaging it.” He shakes his head ruefully. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” he says — and she keeps looking at him like she has lost her mind — he has lost his mind — they are both insane now — and then he ducks down and covers her mouth with his.

_What._

It is so wet. And her heart is slamming behind her rib cage. And his fingers are on her face, then on her neck — he can definitely feel her hammering pulse — and then his tongue is in her mouth. She gasps in shock. This is not a way she’s ever been kissed before. She’s actually never been kissed before. She’s only kissed once — she was the instigator. She did not do all of this to him.

She exhales out a squeak when his wandering hand presses over her breast — her face is just on fire — and she nearly shoves him off her body again when she feels him lightly squeezing, when she feels and hears him quietly groan against her mouth.

He’s frowning at her when he pulls back. “Are you all right?” he asks, touching her hot cheek. “Are you getting sick?”

“I’m all right,” she says, panting lightly.

“Shit,” he says. “I am late. I have to go. Sorry.” He leans back in for another firm kiss — this kind has no tongue — and she generally freezes. “Go back to sleep,” he says when their faces part again. “Rest up. I’ll bring lunch when I come back.”

 

 

  
She’s shell-shocked — so she just keeps lying down in silence — sweat just leaking out of her nervous and anxious body by the bucket. Obviously her first thought is that this is all an insane dream brought on by rage, grief, and her subconscious’ sadistic need to torture her with all of the things she can’t have. But she has never known dreams to have such realism and such clarity and such detail.

She closes her eyes and she finds she can’t possibly go back to sleep. This isn’t her bed — this isn’t her room.

When she sits up — when the bed linen falls off of her body — another bucket of sweat sheds off her when she realizes and sees that she is naked — she was lying down nude without clothes on — with him in the room. She looks to the other side of the bed — she sees wrinkles and an indentation in the pillow, and her insides throb as she starts to realize that maybe it’s possible that she also was lying down naked with him in the same bed.

Fuck.

 

 

  
The next three hours are spent examining every bit of the room. She’s so embarrassed by her casual nakedness around a man that she feels such attraction to that she has to slink off the bed and crawl to the closet, even though she is sure that she is alone. Her face gets hit with another dose of heat when she sees her clothes — she sees her dresses interspersed with some new items she’s never seen before. She also sees a very small area reserved for a man’s clothes. She’s never seen him anything outside of his uniform. She’s also seen him in a state of semi-undressed when he was hurt.

She shakes off the thought. What _is this?_

She picks out a dress that she remembers — one she’s worn many times before. And she throws it on her body quickly, the whole time casting nervous glances at the door.

 

 

  
She takes a short stroll through the hallways — bewildered because nothing looks familiar. This is not the pyramid. She is not in Meereen. The climate is too cold. And every time a person passing by tips their chin to her, smiles, and says hello, she just about jumps in fright. Because she doesn’t know _any_ of these people.

 

 

  
She’s pretending to read on the balcony, with a blanket covering her whole body, when the door to the room opens and he walks back in with a tray of food that he puts down on the table next to the unmade bed. He smiles at her and lightly waves when he spots her — before he bends over and starts straightening the bed up. Is this what he does with her? Is this their routine?

She has accepted certain things about this world, in the long hours she’s had to spin around in circles about it. In this world, he is a little bit older. He knows _her_ — or a version of her — they are together. As in _together._ Perhaps in this world, the Unsullied do not get cut. And that is why other Missandei gets to be with him.

She’s also worried about other Missandei. She wonders what happened to the other woman, because she has displaced other Missandei. Other Missandei could be lost and frightened in her world. Or other Missandei might not exist at all. Maybe this life started the moment she woke up and he’s really just a figment of her mind. Maybe she suffered some sort of accident — maybe she is dead now — and this is her afterlife.

She just doesn’t know. And it’s a great source of anguish and stress.

He’s still in uniform, as he walks out to join her, holding out a ceramic cup with a spoon stuck inside it. The bowl is warm — soup. He tells her it’s a little hot, so be careful. She’s struck with a bashfulness as he leans casually against the railing, as his hands brace against the stone, as she gently blows on the steam emanating off the broth.

 

 

  
“Have you eaten?” she carefully asks.

“I’m not hungry,” he says, his eyes scrutinizing her.

She cuts her eyes away, feeling shy — also scared that he has found her out. He knows she’s an imposter. She’s not who he thinks she is.

“Are you still upset with me, about yesterday?” he finally says quietly. “I thought we resolved it.”

Her eyes are wide. And then she honestly says, “I’m not upset with you! Why do you think I’m upset?”

“You seem distant,” he mutters. “You jump every time I touch you. Or every time I get too close.”

“I’m sorry,” she breathes, clutching the bowl of soup in her hands. “I don’t mean to be so odd. It’s just —”

“It’s all right,” he says gently.

 

 

  
When he starts stripping off his uniform right in front her, she feels her face just swelling up into purple. He casts her a meaningful look, before the corner of his mouth lifts up in a quiet smile — and she swallows the lump in her throat and generally feels like a horrible voyeur, as she makes herself watch.

He leaves his underclothes on. He only pulls off his pants, his shoes, and his shirt, his bare back curled and exposed to her as he bends over, sitting on the bed, folding up fabric, neatly stacking it in a pile. She’s seen him like this before. It’s just — this time, it feels especially intimate.

 

 

  
He’s holding her hand. He’s holding her hand as he drags her through the grounds, to get to the lake. There are people who greet them as they walk along the path — and he gruffly nods at them, sometimes asking them how they are. She’s mostly focused on the way he keeps casually touching her, like there is no shame in it. And her heart has calmed down. It beats steadily in her chest, as she stares at the back of his head, as she sometimes catches his sly glances, his half smiles.

 

 

  
Their bare feet are dangling off of the dock. They are blinking against the sun. He alternates between sitting and lying down on the planks, rambling on about Tyrion and Daenerys and how they make him feel tired sometimes, also about the new recruits — and how soldiers aren’t what they used to be. It takes her a beat to realize that it’s a joke — he’s nudging her — gazing at her with such thick context. She’s too scared to say too much. She’s sure that if she starts talking, he will know, right away, that she is not who he loves.

 

 

  
When she realizes his intent, it is too late. She is shouting his name — both iterations of it — with her hands held up in front of her body, to ward off his advancement. She’s firmly telling him to stop. But his smile is knowing, and it’s also a little malicious.

He’s faster and stronger than she is. So when she tries to make a run for it, she immediately feels his arms encircling her waist — she feels herself being lifted up — and she lets out a shout as he pushes her backwards, as she starts falling.

Her body hits the water loudly — stinging.

 

 

  
“You bastard!” she shouts at him, trying to tread water and hit his stupid laughing face with a splash. He easily ducks it, snickering before he disappears, submerging himself underwater. Her dress is light, but the fabric is still restricting her movements. It would serve him right if she drowned right here and right now — that is, if she’s not already dead.

She lets out a screech, grabbing onto him immediately, when he resurfaces — this time right in front of her.

“Hi,” he says, pulling her body to his, winding his arm around her waist. The water is viscous and thick and it makes her feel drunk and sluggish and dull — as she stares at him — as she feels him drag her legs, her thighs, around his hips.

She has to kiss him. She just has to. So she does. She grasps onto his face as she presses her mouth against his, firmly. She can feel his laughter against her mouth — before he quiets and kisses her back, before the thudding of her blood in her throat comes back and overrides the jumbled thoughts in her mind. He coaxes her mouth open — it takes her a beat to realize what he wants — she opens up her mouth to him and a whimper escapes as he slows the kiss down, as he makes it deeper, as his tongue strokes hers, as she just grabs onto him tighter — just instinctively presses her body closer to his.

He’s holding her face when they have to break — to breathe. He’s panting and reaching out blindly behind him to grab onto the edge of the dock. He says, “I love you.”

It makes her immediately cry. She buries her face into his neck — water splashes against her chin — and she whispers, “I love you, too.”

 

 

  
They talk for hours and hours, as the sun goes down, as they air dry on the dock, as they get chilly. It’s nothing she ever thought she’d have — with him. She asks him to tell her the story again, of when he knew he loved her and knew he couldn’t live without her. The request makes him snort — he tells her that she’s always asking him to tell the story again. At this point, she must have it memorized. She prods him and demands that he repeat it.

He tells her it was hard to watch her entertain the idea of being with other men. She honestly tells him that she could barely stand it — the idea of being with another man. He tells her he was cowardly for a long time — but he doesn’t regret that he found it within himself to be selfish — in the end. He doesn’t regret that he asked her to choose him. She tells him that he was an idiot. He didn’t even need to ask. She was already his. He just needed to get out of his own way.

He grins slyly — and his fingers trail down her neck, down her sternum, down between her breasts — she has to work hard to moderate her breathing — and he talks about the first time he saw her naked and how awkward and mortifying and exciting and confusing that was for him. He tells her he knew he had done something a little bit bad — based on how it made him feel — so that was why he apologized to her.

She keeps comparing notes — keeping track of the little things he reveals with what she knows of her life. And it keeps stunning her — it’s the same life. It’s the same.

 

 

  
He tells her that they haven’t even had dinner yet — but she shoves him forward and tells him to forget it. She’s not hungry.

The door to their room gets slammed shut — then his hands are immediately on her body, grabbing, squeezing, caressing. Her soft words to him are needy. She has thought about this — of course she has obsessively thought about this. She yanks his face down to hers — she understands this now — as she jams her tongue into his mouth and just inelegantly sucks and bites and licks. She whispers that she loves him, she really does, as he frantically searches for the clasps and closures on her wrinkled dress.

His hands are all over her naked body — his mouth is all over her chest — and she’s panting and crying because she is just struck dumb by the amazing reality of this — as her back hits the bed. She says, “Wait, wait.”

He looks up at her quizzically, a little annoyed. She stares back at his face, lips wet and still skimming the exposed skin of her breast. He says, _“What?_ What do you mean _wait?”_

“You’re still dressed,” she says shyly, feeling herself blush.

“Oh,” he says, voice low. And for a split second, she worries she has crossed a line.

But then he casually starts tugging off his clothes, exposing more skin, and this need just flares inside of her. Her hands reach out, trying to help him, trying to get him to be quicker about it. Their knuckles knock together and his shirt gets stuck around his head. He grumbles, “Stop it. It’s easier if I do it myself.” So she transfers her hands to his skin, to his chest, traveling down the ripples of muscle — just wide-eyed and marveling at all of this — she’s just touching him wherever she can. She dips her palms into his pants and grabs a handful of his ass — and he’s _letting her._ He’s not only letting her, he lets out a groan and a sigh — his face concentrating as he throws his shirt on the floor and starts yanking off his pants.

Her eyes do a sweep down his body when he’s completely naked. She blinks back some tears — she doesn’t want to ruin this with her crying — and she’s mostly crying because she’s stunned at all of the trust. She’s humbled that he will give this to her so easily. And he’s also . . . frighteningly beautiful. She has always thought so.

“Hey,” he whispers, brushing his thumbs against the track of tears down the side of her face. “Stop that,” he says, right before he disappears from her vantage point, right before her face bleeds in heat — when she feels him parting her legs, right before he sinks his teeth into her thigh.

 

 

  
There’s really no more hiding it. She cannot stop herself from crying. She’s leaking out so much and it’s all so overwhelming — her hand is clamped over her own mouth to stop the sounds from being too loud — she loves him too much — it feels too good — as her body, coiled in tension, digs into his.

 

 

  
“Shit,” he mutters tiredly, collapsing into the pillow. She immediately nudges into him, getting him to roll over and lift up his arm so that she can plaster her damp body against his. She keeps letting out these feminine sighs — these giddy squeals — and she presses wet kisses into his neck, against his chin.

“I’m never going to let you go,” she says to him, all serious.

“At some point, I will need to take a piss,” he murmurs sleepily. “So you will have to. But I will come back.”

“This is amazing,” she whispers in awe. “Just everything. You are amazing.”

“Thank you,” he says, his breathing going deep. “Go to sleep.”

 

 

  
She jolts up in the bed the moment her mind hits consciousness. She can’t yet see clearly because of the fuzziness in her eyes — so her hands blindly feel around on the other side of the bed.

It is empty and cold.

And after rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she sees that she’s back in her old room, in the pyramid.

 

 

  
He is in the shittiest mood. Because life is shit. And he is shit. And the sun is shit because it’s so fucking pompous and bright.

He got zero sleep the night before — too busy tossing and turning — too busy fixating over how fucking unfair it all is. And of course it has come to this — how could he have been so stupidly naive? Did he honestly think that the two of them would fucking just grow old doing the same thing forever — with him a decrepit and weak wrinkled old man crumbling under the weight of some modest armor? With her forever translating and advising during the daytime and then meeting with him later to discuss how utterly useless and obsolete he is without his fucking youth? Of course it has come to this.

 _“What!”_ he snaps.

Tyrion holds his hands up in peace. “Just thought I’d say good morning. But I see you are menstruating. I’ll leave you to it, then.”

After Tyrion leaves, Grey Worm’s spine goes rigid and straight, when he sees her stumble down the hall — when he sees her spot him.

 

 

  
He cannot even understand her. She’s a frantic mess of incoherent phrases and thoughts. She keeps repeating that the dream felt so real. And he keeps trying to feign interest in this dream of hers — but he keeps trying to shove her toward a point. He keeps prompting her and asking her what exactly she wants to talk to him about. He resists telling her that if she wants to talk about her future betrothal again — he will just fucking go impale himself on a spear then. That’s how much he fucking wants to talk about that.

“No, no, just _listen_ to me,” she says.

“I’m _listening,”_ he says impatiently. “You make _no sense._ Say something for me to listen to!”

She lets out a loud grunt of frustration, holding onto her head, pressing down her hair. He’s about to tell her to just forget it — he has a schedule to keep — come back to him when she actually knows what she’s trying to fucking say — but then her fists flies out and grabs onto his vest. He’s jolted as she yanks him roughly, closer to her face. He blinks in surprise.

“I love _you,”_ she says. “I want to be with _you._ There is no one but _you,_ you ass. You are so foolish. I just want to shake you until you are not stupid anymore!”

 

 

  
She tells Daenerys that while she appreciates the intent, she does not want to know Al Hakim better. Daenerys is predictably very nonplussed by it, just responding with a light shrug of her shoulders and a short statement about how it was probably not a very good match to begin with. He’s too old.

It’s very late when he knocks on her door. He’s always overly concerned with how things appear. He doesn’t want people to catch him sneaking into her room at night. He’s already been caught a few times by other Unsullied, for not sleeping in his own bed. He has told her that they have to be discreet. Otherwise people will assume things about her and about him and about them.

“What things?” she asks, smiling at him softly, coyly, wrapping her arms around his shoulders as he incrementally relaxes. “What can you possibly do to me to ruin my virtue?” she whispers into his ear.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Is that right?”

His mouth quirks up into a smile. He doesn’t know all of it yet. But he knows some of it — he knows _enough._ They have been restrained. They want to be careful about this because they are protective of the longevity of such a thing. On some level, he probably thinks that she is at least half-mocking him, when she says the things she sometimes says — about wanting his body. She knows that she’s really not. She presses her mouth to the jumpy pulse in his neck and she leads them backward toward her bed.

 

 

 


	4. The Costume Party (mod alt-u)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drogo plays matchmaker for his two buddies. The backdrop: a costume party!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mod alt-u. More of my favorite tropes. This time, blind date/set-up trope, and costume party sexy-nurse-get-naked-except-not-really-at-all trope! <3

 

 

 

She doesn’t realize that she’s being set up until it’s much, much too late and she’s already trapped in Dany and Drogo’s cavernous McMansion with four or five or seven strawberry margaritas sloshing around in her stomach. She’s entirely too drunk to drive home. She knows this because Drogo snatches her keys out of her fluffy pocket and tells her that she can crash in one of their guest rooms overnight, his voice lilting in a way that makes her want to throw up all over him when he tells her that his buddy is also staying at their house tonight.

She was blatantly lied to and told that this is a costume party. Her face burned with embarrassment when she arrived with her twelve pack of beer and was confronted with the sight of some pretty and petite woman she doesn’t know, wearing a highly sexualized and very glittery dress, with a wig of platinum blond hair cut into a bob. Missandei had been too stunned and too shy to ask the woman what or who she is supposed to be.

Most of the party guests aren’t even wearing costumes, actually.

Her face is so itchy. She keeps touching it carefully, coming away with creamy yellow-beige paint on her fingertips. Her drunk brain keeps forgetting she’s wearing this makeup. She keeps startling herself whenever she walks past a decorative mirror and catches a glimpse of her own reflection.

“Cool threads,” Tyrion says smoothly, walking up to her, bringing his cocktail glass up to his mouth. A plastic sword impotently hangs at his waist, secured to his expensive belt with . . . duct tape.

“Are you supposed to be —”

“If you say fucking Gimli the dwarf from Lord of the Rings or fucking Balin the dwarf from Lord of the Rings or fucking Thorin Oakenshield the dwarf from Lord of the Rings —” he points a finger at her, pointing at her soft, fluffy, white underbelly, “I will stab you through the uterus.”

“I was going to guess a knight,” she mutters.

He perks up. “That’s actually exactly what I was going for,” he says, pulling his dress shirt lightly off his body, his tie flipping off to the side of his wrist, evidently pleased that she had guessed correctly.

His costume is actually really horrible and lazy. It was actually a complete shot in the dark on her part. He doesn’t look like a knight at all.

“And you’re a furry?” he says — eyes glittering and full of mirth — face relatively straight. “At least, that’s the rumor going around.” He pauses, taking a sip from his cocktail glass. “I may have started that rumor.” He smacks his lips. “Because I was bored.”

She’s staring at him with her mouth ajar — just in disbelief for a slow moment before she slams her hand down on the quartz kitchen counter. “Are you kidding me!” she shouts at him. “We work with some of these people! They already think I’m a lunatic, showing up looking like this!”

“Relax,” Tyrion drawls. “Most people don’t even know what furries are. I’ve had to explain it to so many people tonight.”

 

 

  
He’s incredibly jetlagged — that is, he is wide awake — and he feels entirely too old for this shit. There is a whole mess of drunk white people and their chortling that he constantly has to navigate around in order to get to the fridge or get to the garbage bin or get to the guest bathroom. He constantly stays on the move because he is waiting out Drogo — waiting for Drogo to get drunk past the point of coherency.

God. Hopefully this is something he can still bank on — Drogo not knowing his limits and drinking until he passes out. Grey finds that the thing about leaving the country for the better part of eight years is that nothing stays the same — nobody stays the same. He came back to find a friend that jumped more than a few tax brackets, a friend who apparently has an opinion and a frightening expertise on mail order grocery delivery services, a friend who cohabitates with a severe blond who keeps looking at him with such transparent wariness sometimes.

Drogo told Grey that his wife keeps staring at Grey with such open hostility because she really doesn’t want to set him up with her best friend. There is an entire backstory here with altogether too much detail that he is not very keen on learning about. Drogo told him that Daenerys is really close with said friend and Dany has some concerns — concerns that are not really even a big deal or an issue, Drogo assured him. And in response to that, Grey wanted to say, oh, well, maybe her concerns are valid? He’ll just peace the fuck out of this weird and entirely unnecessary situation then? After all, he is pretty fucked up emotionally and mentally and whatnot. This is sure to be a huge disaster then.

He wants to know when the fuck Drogo became Match.com and shit.

He winces when he feels Drogo’s thick hand come down on his shoulder.

“Gotcha!”

 

 

  
“Remember when we first started working together?” Tyrion says, sliding the shot glass over to her. “You were fresh and young and wide-eyed and innocent. You were like —” he raises his voice into a falsetto, in the worst and most insulting impression of her ever, “— _Tyrion, I don’t drink!”_

“I remember those days,” says a low male voice. “Good times.”

They both swivel their heads to the sound of Drogo’s voice. He’s behind them, shirtless, standing next to his friend, who's wearing a shirt. Drogo is grinning like a psycho, hands in his pockets in this really shitty approximation of casual. When she showed up and asked him about his half-assed 'costume,' he told her he's Tarzan.  

The temperature of her face and body immediately shoots up a million degrees when she glances at the friend's face. Because of course _the_ friend is scorching hot. And not in costume. She was afraid of this. She has been furtively looking at him throughout the night — before she realized he was _the_ friend. She was just watching him because she didn’t recognize him and he’s good-looking. And that is what one tends to do when it comes to good-looking people. Naturally, she should have figured out that he was _the_ friend because she has never met one of Drogo’s friends who wasn’t pointlessly handsome.

“Hey!” Drogo says brightly — just forcing entirely too much uncharacteristic positivity in his tone. “So this is my friend, Grey! He just moved back! He knows nobody! And I was like — hey! I should introduce him to Missandei! Because she . . . also lives here.” Drogo clears his throat. “She usually looks different.”

“She doesn’t quite look like the picture you showed me,” Grey says tepidly.

The fuck? What a fucking _asshole._

 

 

  
So if he had to guess why Daenerys and Missandei are best friends — if he really had to hazard a guess — he would say that they probably get along so well because they are both angry women who seem like they’re one wrong look away from just ripping out his spleen and eating it. He’s not entirely sure he finds this attractive.

This is weird. This is fucking weird and awkward. He’s so weird and awkward. He supposes that there was a part of him that knew — based on Drogo’s general track record when it comes to appropriately dealing with human emotions — that Grey was getting set up with dog-girl. Of course he now knows her name is Missandei, but for the better part of the night when he didn’t, he was calling her dog-girl in his head. For obvious reasons.

“You both speak multiple languages. You both like to travel. You both like kale —”

“I don’t like kale,” Grey interjects — but Drogo is unhearing.

“You both tan really easily!”

She groans loudly. She says, “Oh my God,” as she drags her hand down her cheek. And then in horror, she pulls her hand away — her makeup is smeared — he sees that, in fact, she probably does tan easily, on account of being dark-skinned like him — _is this why they are fucking getting set up with one another?_ — fucking Drogo — and then she looks at her dirty, yellow palm in horror. She shakes her head in disbelief. And then she says, “I’m going to go wash my hand.”

Her fabric dog tail is swaying and bouncing as she turns around without another word to them and lightly pushes into the crowd of loitering guests, trying to find the nearest bathroom.

“Hey,” Tyrion says. “I think that went super well, Drogo. The sexual chemistry? My God. Palpable.”

 

 

  
Her face looks completely whack as she stares back at her reflection through the mirror. Her makeup has become blotchy from all of the touching throughout the night. And she legitimately thought this was going to be a costume party because that’s what she was told so she didn’t bring a change of clothes. She can’t really patch up her makeup because she left the stuff in her car. And Drogo stole her car keys. Maybe she should just tuck her tail in between her legs and get an Uber and just go home like a coward and just figure out how to get her car back tomorrow.

 

 

  
He shivers a little bit when he opens the door and walks out onto the back deck. Her yellow fur stands out bright against the distant street lights beyond the tall trees that give the yard privacy. She’s fanning her face with her hand. She tenses when she realizes she’s not alone.

“So,” he says. “What’s up with the dog get-up?”

“It’s just my Saturday going out outfit,” she says sarcastically. “I just meet all my potential suitors like this. See if they’re into the furry lifestyle. Save myself some time, you know? I’m getting to a certain age. No sense in wasting time with normals.”

He tries not to grimace too obviously. “O-kay,” he says slowly.

“I’m kidding, man.” She snorts. “Wow. You think I’m crazy.”

“Normal is overrated,” he says, leaning forward and bracing his forearms against the railing of the deck.

 

 

  
She sighs and she finally fesses up and tells him that she’s actually really embarrassed that they are meeting like this, so maybe that’s why she’s acting a little bit weird. She tells him that she’s really sweaty because the costume really keeps all of the moisture trapped inside like a greenhouse. She tells him that she normally doesn’t look so bonkers. She normally just looks like a regular ol’ person. She confesses to him that she’s also a little bit drunk — or a lot drunk — because she was very nervous about tonight. She drinks when she gets nervous because it’s just nice to have something to hold in her hand.

She glances at him and she observes that she sounds utterly psychotic at the moment, and it’s not like she wants to skin his face and wear it — it’s more that she was nervous about tonight because Drogo has been talking about him incessantly to her, talking about how he’s the best guy and the best friend and really smart and really accomplished and really cool. It gave her a bit of a complex, a bit of anxiety because such meetings aren’t usually so fraught with context and people usually aren’t so cool.

He starts to correct her and tell her that he’s actually not very cool. He’s actually boring and uptight and joyless and has been about work and only work for a very long time. Drogo is actually an idiot and a liar.

But she talks over him, not letting him get a word in edgewise. He watches her animated face and how she talks with her hands — and he tries to remember the picture of her that Drogo had showed him in a quick flash, on his phone. Grey tries to figure out what she actually looks like — not that it matters, but maybe it matters.

“Are you hungry?” she asks suddenly. “I have the munchies.”

 

 

  
She tasks him with stealing her keys back from Drogo — after she asks him if he’s sober enough to drive. Her demeanor and her face are so serious that it makes him want to laugh. And he tells her that he’s sober enough to drive.

“Okay,” she says, grinning at him, tilting her head to the side. “How much have you had to drink? Be honest!” She pokes him in the stomach.

“Honestly?” he says. “I actually don’t drink that often. I didn’t drink tonight.”

 

 

  
“Hey, I need Missandei’s car keys.” Grey decides that the easiest course of action in getting these keys is not what Missandei dictated — that which she called secret agent espionage shit where he tells white lies and puts on some sort of fake accent. He simply figures that being straightforward is probably the best course of action.

“Nice!” Drogo says, immediately palming at his pants pockets, trying to locate the keys.

Daenerys is looking at Grey through these eye-slits. And then she stonily asks, “Why?”

He shrugs. “She’s hungry.”

“We have food here.”

“She doesn’t want to eat here.”

“Well, where does she want to eat?” Daenerys says testily. “We can order in for her.”

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters. “You got me, okay? Obviously my devious plan is to get her alone with me with no one around so that I can kill her and bury her body in a ditch.”

“Ha!” Drogo breaks in, slamming his hand on Grey’s chest a little too hard — almost enough to knock some wind out of him. “Joke! Man, I told you he’s a funny guy, babe. Remember?”

 

 

  
Missandei screeches when the car drifts to the wrong side of the road — her hand immediately reaching out to correct the steering wheel. Her heart is pounding, and she’s trying to catch her breath as he tells her that it’s been awhile since he’s driven on this side of the road.

Missandei is about to demand that he pull over and turn off the car before they both get way fucking killed — but then she catches his smile — a really honest to God smile.

That’s when she realizes that he was messing with her.

 

 

  
She’s kind of adorably indecisive — and she tells him that she’s only indecisive when it comes to food — not with general life stuff. She can’t decide if she wants to eat a bunch of fat-ladened calories and go to a diner or a burger drive-thru — or if she wants to be good and just get a small little snack or a nutritious piece of fruit or a veggie tray.

“Or just air?” she says to him, pushing herself out of the passenger seat of her own car. “Maybe I should just consume some delicious air?” She walks toward the bright lights of the twenty-four-hour grocery store and she jokingly assures him that she doesn’t have an eating disorder. “Not really, at least,” she says. “Not anymore at least.” She coughs. “But some mental habits are sometimes hard to shake off, you know?”

“I do know,” he says, smiling softly, trailing behind her.

In the store, she pulls off the hood of her dog costume, revealing a riot of warm, dark curls. She self-consciously pats at her hair and wonders out loud to herself if her hair looks okay, trying to get a good look at herself in reflective surfaces, before she remembers her phone and pulls it out of a pocket. When she clicks on the screen and opens up her camera, flipping it around to selfie-mode, she spontaneously snorts out a laugh at her own reflection. And she asks him, “How do you even look at me with a straight face, man?”

He wants to tell her that it’s actually not that hard. It’s not hard at all to look at her.

 

 

  
She tells him that her costume is seriously so hot and a little itchy — does he mind stopping by her place so she can change? She realizes that all of her fucking sentences and all of her words sound like one big come on. It doesn’t help that he is so handsome. His handsome face inspires all of these horrible blurts of honesty to come flying out of her drunk mouth. Everything she says sounds like the beginning of a porno — like, hey baby, wanna come over and take off my dog outfit so we can _fuccck?_

He clears his throat at that. He patiently and politely prompts her and says, “Um, so where do you live? I can, uh, punch it into the GPS.”

 

 

  
She drops her keys down onto her kitchen counter as he hefts two grocery bags onto it — they bought entirely too much food and too much general household stuff like sponges and dishwashing detergent — as she nudges her butt onto one of her stools and starts helping him pull stuff out of the bags.

He tells her that she has a nice place. He looks at the pile of newspapers and magazines and stacks of mail littered all over the kitchen island. He tells her that her place feels homey and lived in.

She grins and tells him, “Not everyone has a maid that comes once a week,” referring to Dany and Drogo.

He realizes that they stopped at her place so that she can change out of her dog costume — but she seems to have forgotten this. Instead, she’s pulling out a plastic-covered chicken salad wrap and carefully unrolling it so that she can squeeze in a little bit of mayo into it. She’s telling him about how she came to get her apartment, as she carefully cuts the wrap in half with a butterknife. He doesn’t want to break the spell or the mood that they’ve managed to fall into, so he doesn’t remind her that she had expressed wanting to change. He just watches her eyes and the changing expressions on her yellow-streaked face — as she takes bites from her half of the wrap, as she tells him about her life and her family — as she bombards him with question after question about his life and his family.

To circumvent potential awkwardness — he places his hand over hers — just for a quick moment to get her attention — and he softly tells her that he actually no longer has any family.

“Oh,” she says breathily. “Can I ask what happened? Do you want to talk about it?”

 

 

  
He tells her that he and Drogo met when they were very young, at a very pivotal time in both of their lives. She kind of smiles wistfully at that — and she tells him that she says the same thing about Dany all the time. She looks at him from across the counter and says, “Isn’t that how it always works out? What is meant to happen just invariably happens — when you’re ready for it.”

 

 

  
She point-blank asks him when his last relationship was. He tells her that his last relationship was a long distance one — as most of his relationships have been — because of his former job — and honestly, his experience is fairly limited. He feels self-conscious and really young and under-experienced — and she must be his very opposite in this respect, being so open and fun and sweet and pretty. He tells her that his life hasn’t been very conducive to that sort of stuff. He kind of dwelled in a lot of death, being stationed overseas, doing what he did and all of that.

“It’s very hard to deal with normalcy when everything around you is just . . .” He fights to find the right words. “When everyone is just trying to survive. When everyone is just trying to get by, you don’t really want to talk about stupid frivolous shit with another person who doesn’t understand your day-to-day life. It was just easier to be alone.”

“But now you are back,” she says softly.

He refrains from going into detail — about the convoluted circumstances that led him to make the very hard decision to leave a government contract that he very much loved — just to preserve more of his sanity. “Yes, I am back.”

“And you let Drogo set you up with me,” she says.

He laughs. “I didn’t let him do anything! You know he took it upon himself!”

 

 

  
He knows it’s entirely presumptuous, but he figures that it’s appropriate, given this bizarre night and the bizarre trajectory it has taken. He remembers the back-cracking bear hug he got from Drogo when he was picked up at the airport earlier in the day — and how he wanted to throttle the guy when Grey told Drogo that he just wanted to lie down and rest for a while — and Drogo countered that by saying that they were actually throwing a costume party that night. It had been in the works for a while, so that is why. And he remembers telling Drogo that he only has the fucking clothes on his back and in his one suitcase — the rest of his paltry shit is in some freight making its way across the ocean at the moment. Thus — he has no costume. No capacity to dress up at all, actually. No capacity to party at all, actually.

That was when Drogo told him that there is a woman that he should meet. It’s not a blind date. It’s not a set up. She’s just a friend, and she’s really cool, and she’s single.

He remembers Drogo — subtle as he always is — letting the words hang in the air, making Grey just roll his eyes.

It’s this thick context that inspires him to tell her that he’s entirely like . . . messed up. He’s a little bit nuts. He has a fair bit of personal baggage. He has issues when it comes to people — and family — and relationships. And intimacy. After all, he’s been on his own for a long time now, and he’s been telling himself that’s how he prefers it. But he’s older now and he’s starting to wonder if he’s been completely wrong. He tells her that he knows this is all sounding a fair bit fucking intense, and they just met — this is what he means when he says he is a little bit nuts.

He tells her that Drogo was right. She seems like a very cool person. And he’d like to get to know her better — over time. And that is a fucking weird sentence that just came out of his mouth. He tells her, “I don’t know how to do this or say this without sounding like a total idiot.”

 

 

  
She’s still in her dog costume as she flips over another page of the photo album, trying to find the picture she was telling him about — of the summer after her parents died that she thought she was very deep and tortured and dyed her hair blue and shaved the sides of her head into a mohawk and wrote very angry and very bad fatalistic poetry. She keeps flipping page after page, self-conscious about how long it is taking to find the picture, telling him that she’s sorry because she knows that it’s so fucking interesting to watch someone look through their shit like this.

That’s when he decides he really cannot take this anymore. He can’t take how ridiculously cute her mannerisms are — her streaked face — her messy hair — her poofy, shapeless, furry costume — he tells himself that maybe she is right. Everything does happen how it’s meant to happen. Maybe he made the very difficult decision to come back — so that he could have the opportunity for _this._

He leans forward and he kisses her. He hasn’t kissed anyone in a very long time — so his heart is pounding in his throat and he can’t hear a fucking thing because the blood is rushing in his ears. She tastes acrid — because of the face paint — but her mouth is wet and soft and pliable. His hand comes up to cup her cheek. He just feels gratitude.

 

 

  
She is pretty much dying. She is burning up in her dog costume — Jesus, how is she still in this thing? — and she is being allowed to liberally touch like, the hottest, most interesting guy she’s probably ever met. And it hasn’t gotten all PG-13 yet — but if she can find the fucking zipper in the back, if she can reach it — it _can_ get PG-13.

They are making out. They are making out like they are teenagers. Her tongue is in his mouth and his tongue is in her mouth. They are making out on her couch. She is sitting on him. She is straddling him. This is the most action she’s gotten in a long time. This is amazing.

He finds the zipper, actually — with his fingers drumming at the base of her neck — like he’s weighing his options. And she encircles her arm around his shoulders and presses herself up against him tightly, her sensitive lips dragging against his. He’s pretty amazing at kissing. She is pretty sure he’s amazing at everything.

When the zipper goes down, the loud sound of it makes her shudder. And she had forgotten that she is wearing very little under the dog costume because it was sweltering to begin with. His hand touches her bare back — slick and wet with sweat — and she whimpers against his mouth.

 

 

  
He pulls away from her — panting — breathing hard. He gently grabs her hips and picks her up — she’s lighter than he expected her to be — and he’s standing — and he’s dropping her down to her feet — and the front of her body is smearing itself against the front of his body and he almost loses his mind — the way she’s lazily looking at him from underneath her lashes.

He carefully pulls the dog costume off of her damp body — feeling the material stick to her skin in some places. She’s got on a sports bra and running shorts underneath.

He’s been trying to figure out — all night — what she actually looks like underneath the dog costume — not entirely a superficial thing. But it has been a little bit unnerving for him — to have had such a strong connection to someone who is masked and who he cannot get a clear visual of.

 

 

  
In her cramped bathroom, with her sitting on top of her sink cabinet, he grabs her chin, angling it to really scrutinize her face, using the wet washcloth to gently wipe off her utterly wrecked dog make-up. The sweat has dried on her body. She has pulled on loose pants and a t-shirt. And the more and more he uncovers of her face — the more fucking lost and gone he knows he is.

“Shit. You’re really, really beautiful,” he says quietly, before biting down on his bottom lip, concentrating, trying to get the very last bit of yellow and black drawn-on whiskers off of her face.

 

 

  
She does them both a favor — because she senses his anxiety. It buzzes loudly, much like her own anxiety. And she voices what they are both a bit scared of, out loud. She says, “Hey, just so you know, dude, we’re not sleeping together tonight,” as she slides her arms around his neck, playfully pulling him closer to her body, in between her legs where she sits on her sink cabinet. “I’m more of a first date, second date, maybe third date kind of girl.”

“Maybe third date?” he asks quizzically. “Did you say that backwards?”

 

 

  
He’s jetlagged, so it’s midday somewhere — for him — and she’s yawning against his mouth and trying not to be so obvious about it. He holds onto her and quietly tells her that he’s kind of stranded — is there a direct bus route back to Drogo’s and Dany’s? She quietly laughs and tells him that the buses don’t run to the suburbs at this time of night — or rather, at this time of morning.

“I can drive you back in a few hours,” she whispers sleepily.

“I feel like I’ve known you forever,” he confesses honestly.

Her eyes flutter open — more alert. “God, I know,” she says. “I feel that way, too.”

 

 

  
Out of the corner of Drogo’s eye, Dany flicks left, another article on her tablet. She has been torturing him all morning, telling him that she’s waiting for the news story to break about a beautiful young woman whose life was snuffed out too early, in a violent act by some PTSD psycho-stranger that strangled her dead because his stupid fucking friend thought it was a great idea to play matchmaker.

“Babe,” Drogo says. “Be reasonable, will you? They probably just went back to her place and fucked. And then they fell asleep — as people tend to do after they fuck, when it’s nighttime.”

“You _shut up,”_ she snaps. “What do you even know about this guy anymore?”

Drogo clears his throat and raises his coffee cup to the window, where he is staring out of. He watches as Missandei’s car slowly pulls into the driveway. “I know that they are back. And Missy looks pretty alive to me.”

 

 

 

 


	5. Reunion (canon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Unsullied make it to King's Landing after taking the Rock for no reason, after Euron burned all their ships. Takes place during season 7, episode 7.

 

 

  
When the Unsullied arrive at King’s Landing, the sky is bright and sunny but the air has a chill. Grey Worm is told it’s been unseasonably cold by a tense-looking Tyrion, who does not say much else. He just walks off and leaves them to follow him. Tyrion does not offer any explanation for his near-catastrophic lapse in judgement.

There’s a thick weight in the pit of Grey Worm's stomach — a feeling of inexplicable dread that is simultaneously foreign and familiar. He never feels this way before battle. He always feels this way around her. He lies to himself and tells himself that this feeling of fear is due to his oppressive sense of duty pressing down on his back. He doesn’t realize he’s about to start tugging at old routines, start reverting and retreating and pulling up armor around himself.

Thus, he reports to the queen with an efficient and manic directness, eyes pointed forward but also purposely not focusing on any particular thing. He has to apply nearly all of his concentration toward an air of indifference.

He can sense Missandei on the outskirts of his vision though — he always instinctively looks for her. He used to tell himself it’s a habit to survey the space. He has since admitted to himself that it’s more than that — it’s been more than that for a long time. Right now, she is a blur that wavers in and out. His stomach flips almost to the point of distraction, when he suddenly remembers how the sound of the room and from her got snuffed out when she clenched her thighs around his head and all he could hear was the sound of his throbbing blood in his ears.

So he yells at Tyrion, as a means of taking his mind off of her. He is accusatory and unfair, as he shouts, “Lannisters only know how to protect Lannisters!”

Daenerys is putting up with this. Tyrion is uncharacteristically quiet and staring back at him. Grey Worm just feels so angry and so emotional. This has been building up, the entire journey back. The loss was so senseless. The loss could have been greater. All because Tyrion was wrong and so boldly confident in his cleverness before he was so brutally wrong.

Grey Worm is not letting himself acknowledge her. He doesn’t want to go outside of procedure. He tells himself nothing is different, in this respect. He tells himself that he is behaving in the realm of what is normal. After the meeting is over, he quickly leaves without looking at her, to go speak with his officers.

 

 

  
After an almost unbearable period of uncertainty, she finally started to learn of the travel progress of the Unsullied through short missives tied onto birds. Once they established a rapport based on the regularity in which she visited him, the keeper tried to make a joke with her, mentioning that the latest love note she’s been waiting for with baited breath has finally arrived. His tone was light, but thoroughly sarcastic because he already knew what the note said. She was all elbows and rudeness as she ignored his comment and greedily yanked the paper from him before unfurling it in her hands. The message was succinct. Seven days out.

It wasn’t his handwriting, but all of the messages sounded like him. The messages were probably all dictated. She blinked her eyes and sucked in a shaky breath in front of the keeper, who politely ignored her display of emotion.

She counted down the weeks, then the days, then the hours, then the minutes, with her pulse throbbing in her throat.

She didn’t expect that she’d be the first person he’d run to. She knows him well enough to expect that he’d do his duty.

Something has changed between them though. She knows it based on the heat that scorches her face and body when she thinks about the last time they were together alone. She also knows it based on memory of how tightly he held her after she made him promise to come back to her.

This day is the fulfillment of that promise. So she thinks it’s actually momentous and important — for them — and she tries to commemorate and attach meaning to it by catching his eyes to smile in gratitude — she’s so glad he is safe and back. She is glad he kept his promise. He is everything she needs and sometimes all that she can see.

And well, it’s confusing when he purposefully moves his gaze away.

Inexplicably, she feels ashamed and embarrassed. She looks down at her feet, and she ends up clasping and wringing her hands together silently as he details, to Daenerys, the exact number of casualties and what he tensely describes as an uneventful walk to King’s Landing from Casterly Rock. He is angry over the loss of their ships. He is angry at Euron Greyjoy. He is also very angry with Tyrion and struggling to hold back all of his bitter recriminations.

 

 

  
He finds a way to be occupied for hours. He stands to attention, rigid and hyperaware, stock-still, as the meeting with Cersei Lannister takes place beyond his vantage point. The Unsullied are highly visible because they are evidence of Daenerys’ power. His eyes comb the skies for the dragon even though he knows it’s not time yet. A swoop of wind rolls through them, making him clench his jaw to prevent the shivering. He hates this place and how deeply uncomfortable and excessive it is.

He has had a lot of time to think — not just today, but for the entire trek from Casterly Rock to King’s Landing. He has qualified a lot of his thinking as go-nowhere nonsense. He has alternated between these ongoing, stupid, foreign fantasies and these episodes of fear-driven panic and worst-case scenes in his head. Sometimes he imagines her dying in front of his face because he can’t protect her. Sometimes he imagines himself dying alone and anonymously, which used to be ideal but now it is a burden. Sometimes he tells himself it wasn’t real and he has been lying to himself and that everything has changed for the worse in his absence — that she has realized she has made a mistake and that she was lying about how she felt.

He also feels embarrassed, honestly. He feels like too much time has passed. The momentum is gone. It is awkward now. It is disorienting to be back, even though all he wanted during the long walk back was to see her again.

 

 

  
She doesn’t want to burden anyone, so she eats dinner in silence by herself — in a corridor. She’s feeling sorry for herself. She finds the food in King’s Landing tasteless and bland. She doesn’t like the utensils. She doesn’t like the smell. She doesn’t like the texture. She doesn’t like the way people stare at her here. She sits on the dirt ground and tucks herself into a corner next to a doorway and slowly eats from the plate balanced on her knees. She melodramatically tells herself that she really knows nothing about men. She knows nothing what about they mean and what they want and what they are trying to say to her.

When Daenerys stumbles across her, flanked by two guards — Missandei checks really quickly and sees that they’re not Grey Worm — Daenerys arches a brow — knowingly — and says, “You know, we have a place for this,” jutting her chin at Missandei’s half-eaten plate.

Missandei already feels ashamed, pulling the queen’s attention away with trivial matters. Nonetheless, she still blurts out, “He doesn’t want to see me.”

Daenerys immediately smiles down at her, fondly. “Well, you know that’s just not true.”

“He won’t even look at me.”

“You know, I once got advice from a handmaiden on how to please a man.” Daenerys pauses. “I’m not sure it was very good advice.”

Missandei’s upturned face reflects her confusion.

 

 

  
He’s shoving the tasteless starch into his mouth with efficiency, trying to get it over with as fast as possible, when his second-in-command drops down in the seat next to him with a mug of watery ale. The water is not safe to drink and this city wholly depends on imports. The fruit is not fresh and the spices are stale. He hates this place. He hates the inhabitants. He hates the leadership. He hates the soldiers. He hates their training. He hates what they have done. He hates what he is doing here, trading information and fallacies with Lannisters and Greyjoys. He tries to be steadfast in his commitment — and he hates Dog Killer’s grinning face right now. He hates that the Unsullied are drinking alcohol. He cannot stop them because they have become too familiar with one another. This is a byproduct of individualism. Daenerys keeps telling him that this is the thing that will make them stronger and that will ensure their victory. He wants to believe her. Sometimes he thinks that this is the thing that will kill them all. She keeps telling him that they must have a greater purpose — a thing to fight for. He has told her that they are all fighting for her. She has told him it has to be bigger than her. They have to fight for themselves and they have to fight for the right to a place and a sense of ownership — and they have to fight for the people that they love.

The Unsullied wasted so much time on the walk to King’s Landing talking to one another, building kinship. He constantly worries that their ever-growing sense of familiarity and comfort is going to result in all of their deaths. He obsesses over this, especially after Tyrion was wrong. If Tyrion is wrong and Tyrion is the queen’s hand then the queen can be wrong — either because she heeded Tyrion’s advice or due to her own mistakes. Then he will die. Their queen will die. All of it will be lost. Missandei will die. He will lose her no matter what. No matter what, he is destined to lose her.

In Low Valyrian, with that stupid grin on his stupid face, Dog Killer asks Grey Worm if he’d like to slip away. Dog Killer can cover for him for the rest of the night. After all, “they’ve” been apart for a while.

The words linger in the air. Others are eavesdropping. Grey Worm feels intensely angry and uncomfortable. He can only resort to ignoring and pretending none of it exists and no one knows.

Dog Killer murmurs that she looked really beautiful today.

In the Common Tongue, Grey Worm snaps, “Do not talk about matters you do not even understand!” even though Dog Killer is not proficient in the Common Tongue. Dog Killer understands the emotion and the tone though. Grey Worm had spoken in Common Tongue on purpose, to put Dog Killer in his place.

The effect is non-existent. Dog Killer only widens his grin. Long exhausting days and short restless nights staying warm around fires were the structure around the pervasive boredom of journeying to King’s Landing on foot. Rumors about him and Missandei had already been traded around among the Unsullied for a long time now. He doesn’t think they respect him as much anymore. He’s become a very distracting point of interest. They are all very curious. They are not only curious about logistics and how it actually works — they are very curious about the story. They generally express happiness for him. They tell him he makes them feel hopeful about the future. This might not be what he wants for them at all.

When he saw Euron Greyjoy from afar today, he couldn’t believe that he had to exercise restraint. He can’t believe that he wasn’t allowed to stomp over there to slice open that fucking asshole’s throat.

Dog Killer drags Grey Worm’s finished plate across the table, stacking it over his own empty plate. He tells Grey Worm to go have the rest of his night to himself. Or not. Maybe share the night with somebody.

In Common Tongue, Grey Worm slams out, “Close your fucking mouth!”

It’s a word Dog Killer knows. They all know the bad words. He responds with a laugh. He says, “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck. Shit!”

 

 

  
Her heart is pounding in her chest. She should resent that she is always the one who has to chase after him — and it is not like this gets much easier as time goes on. While she should resent it because this is not correct — all the Westerosi stories she’s been told and all the stories she’s read and heard have dictated that the men chase their women. Men covet women, and men win their women. This is another reason why she dislikes this culture. This is not at all what it was like at home on Naath at all. The memories are fuzzy and far away, but she remembers this image of her mother reaching out a hand to her father. And she remembers a sense of choice.

She feels the compulsion to chase him anyway. She has to seek him out constantly and she has to pursue because the threat of time is on their backs, and this sense of urgency only makes it feel harder and scarier and more terrible. There’s a nightmare coming, and there’s just no time left to waste.

She arrives to the inn just in time to see him get up from the table and walk up the stairs, without seeing her. The others, however, have already spotted her. She feels self-conscious, so she enters the space as he vacates it, with an empty plate in her hand. She has to hold this plate awkwardly as she carries on many short and casual conversations with various Unsullied, some of whom she’s more familiar with than others. Some of them are her friends, too. She hasn’t seen them in a long time, too. They keep trying to get her to linger — she finds their stories earnest and nice — and they keep telling her these awful battle stories that make her feel tension and also gratitude. They keep slipping in little mentions and anecdotes about Grey Worm, because they know she would find it interesting. They complain to her that the trek to King’s Landing was unbearably dull. Dull is now a part of their vocabulary. As are very light critiques of their commander. Most of them lower their voices — as if they think Grey Worm can overhear them from upstairs — before they tell her that his mood was often terrible and short and sometimes cruel. It’s not really abnormal for him. It’s a survival mechanism and he is the best of all of them. But perhaps that survival mechanism was out of place while they were having easy conversations around the fire after a long day of pushing their bodies hard to cover an inhuman distance. Their tolerance for his shit attitude dwindled in those moments.

She blandly tells Dog Killer that Grey Worm certainly is difficult sometimes.

He tells her that Grey Worm is upstairs, just as her eyes drift to the staircase.

 

 

  
Getting an entire room to himself feels excessive — it always does. He is still not used to this kind of hierarchy. He does not think he will ever be used to this kind of hierarchy. Daenerys is his one blind spot.

He tries to sleep, but his mind is too restless. So he just lies down and stares up into darkness. He continues to do what he can’t stop doing. He worries, and he feels fear. He doesn’t know how much time he has left. He hates himself for squandering it right now. He hates himself for his cowardice. He worries that she will feel pain, and he will be the cause of her pain. He fears that he will not be able to carry on without her. He worries that is a possible future. He tries to think of ways to avoid this. He cannot bear to take back what he already knows. He is just rendered immobile with everything. He remembers when his mind was uncluttered and it was easy to stare straight ahead at purpose and mission. He cannot go back to that.

He thinks he images the tap on his door at first. And then he hears her voice say, “It’s me.”

 

 

  
She anticipated that she’d be cautious and quiet and a little overly serious when he opens the door. She anticipated that it’d be like how it was in the past. But then she sees his face push out from the shadows — her heart starts pounding — and she can detect the scent of him and she feel his proximity as he nudges her out of the way so he can close the door behind them.

The room is dark and a little drafty. Her eyes feel hot and her skin tingles. She had these plans to ask him what he’s been trying to accomplish by ignoring her all day, but instead she reaches out to touch her palm to his cheek.

Her back cracks audibly and the air leaves her body as he tightly compresses her body in his arms and presses his face into her neck. She feels him lift her, her feet leaving the floor.

 

 

  
The kissing is unlike most of the kisses they’ve shared in the past. It’s sloppy and embarrassingly wet, for one. She’s needy and embarrassingly vocal, for another. They are kissing on a bed, which probably means they are going to have sex again. The first time she took off her clothes in front of him — for him — she was wracked with nervousness and anxiety because there is always the fear of rejection. She was simultaneously sure and unsure of his feelings for her. The nerves were distracting for a long time. It took a while for her body to take over.

Right now, it is immediate. She has all of these things to say to him, but she can say them to him _later._ She breaks her mouth away from his so she can breathe, because she’s lightheaded and afraid she might faint. She also breaks her face away so she can look at him as she touches him. She boldly runs her hands over his face, his neck, his shoulders, his ribs, and his hips to confirm to herself that he is real and alive and unhurt and lying right next to her.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispers. “You were gone for longer than I expected.”

He holds her face tightly in his hand. He’s forcing her to look him in the face — through the dark. He says, “I _know.”_

 

 

  
When people are determined enough — toward anything — they will find a way. It took all of one second being in her presence, to remember everything. This is why it’s enough. This is why he fights harder. This is why he can learn to better manage his fears.

This time, he’s the one who pulls off their clothing. He feels his hands shaking uncontrollably — from an excess of adrenaline, from the cold, and from nervousness — and he tells himself that he needs the practice. But he also just can’t wait to see her body again.

She hisses when his cold fingers skim her breasts — it makes him recoil in horror right away, snatching his hand back. He says, “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she says, grabbing his hand by the wrist and forcefully placing it over her breast. She sighs breathily. He lightly rubs his calloused palm over her soft skin. Her breathing hitches and then settles into a low groan. He freezes — as his face throbs in a kind of disbelief. Everything is new and everything is still uncertain. When she softly laughs, he just wishes he will be enough.

He squeezes, trying to be very careful with her. It’s something completely new. He generally never worries about whether or not he is doling out pain. Actually, that’s typically his goal with his hands. Everything with her is so different. He asks, “Does it hurt?”

“No, not yet. Try a little harder.”

He squeezes incrementally harder. “Does it hurt now?”

She laughs again. “No. It’s barely different. I’m not that delicate. You can touch me harder.”

The words kind of ring in his ear. 

 

 

  
He doesn’t know why he’s shaking so much. It’s not coming from his arms or his legs, but from the center of him. It actually makes him feel self-conscious, and he’s kind of hoping she doesn’t notice, even as he knows he’s deluding himself because of course she notices. He keeps hoping that nothing about him is too offensive. He keeps thinking that if he stays silent, then his deficiencies will be more invisible. He keeps trying to shut all the thoughts from his head so he can concentrate, but he doesn’t really know how to relax. This is only the second time this has ever happened and maybe it does not get better because he can’t get better.

In the dark, on the bed, he hears her whisper, “Your body is shaking. Is it too cold? Do you want me to go retrieve wood for the hearth?”

“No,” he says quickly, trying to stay still and stop the involuntary shaking. He actually finds the idea of her leaving the bed and putting her clothes back on to go hunt for wood because he is weak and frail to be just the most mortifying thing. He tries holding his breath. And then he forces out, “No, I’m not cold. I just — I —”

“What?”

“I don’t know why it’s like this. It’s never done this before.”

He expects her empathy or maybe her pity. He expects to be made to feel silly and childish. But instead, she says, “Oh, but it has done _this_ before.” Her voice is quiet and intentional and sultry and low — and for a moment, he blitzes out and his mind is quiet — because of the sound of that voice. “Don’t you remember?”

He’s on his back, and she’s looming over him. He feels like he’s glaring at her. His throat is dry, and says, “Yes. I remember.”

“When you were gone, I remembered it a lot. Mostly when I was alone and lonely and in bed and thinking of being _with_ you.”

“Missandei —” He almost wants to tell her to shut her mouth and stop talking, in an instinctive and stupid way. She makes him feel so odd and confused sometimes. She upends all the things he knows to be true sometimes. “I just need you.”

That garners a bout of silence. She stills above him, her sticky hand touching his chest.

And then her lips touch down on his, as she shuffles around on top, as she fully sits her weight on top of him, on top of where he was cut. She’s wet and hot and feels heavy on top of him.

She says, “I will never forget you said that,” before she lets out this dreamy sigh against his mouth, and he’s glad she can’t see him very well. He blinks back the wetness in his eyes rapidly — as he kisses her back — as he holds onto her thighs, digging his fingers into her flesh, maneuvering her around, experimentally. She eagerly takes his cue and starts moving along with his guidance. He thinks that this is fucking unbelievable and insane.

“Do you know — that you’re not shaking right now?” she asks breathlessly.

 

 

  
She wondered if the second time would feel like the first time did. She wondered how sex would progress. She wondered if the first time would be the thing to live up to for the rest of their lives or if the first time would end up being something they looked back on, laughing about all the things they didn’t yet know they were capable of.

They are in closer quarters with others than before. She feels self-conscious about making too much noise and having others hear them. She keeps her mouth shut and her teeth clenched, and she can clearly hear the wet sound of his mouth on her body. She remembers a conversation with Daenerys, about not feeling shame and making love under the stars. For this reason, she widens her legs a little bit more. For this reason, she nudges her hips and presses herself harder against his mouth.

She’s strung up tight and biting down on her fist when he lightens his tongue and experimentally slows the pace. She’s so mindless that she flares anger and she kicks him harder than is kind — slamming her heel into his shoulder blade. She feels frustration and she snaps, “Don’t do that!”

And then a flood of embarrassment hits her in the face.

“Don’t do what?” he asks.

She looks down at his patient face in horror. She says, “I’m sorry!”

He disregards the apology. He repeats, “Don’t do what?” as he smooths his hand over her calf and pulls her down closer to his face.

 

 

  
He reaches up and squeezes her breast hard with his free hand as he continues working her down below with his mouth. He pinches a nipple and that is what it takes to make her release a loud yelp before her body convulses violently around him, before she moans out his name and his name only, over and over. To him, he’s been trying to build up to this, so he enthusiastically massages her body with gratitude and in relief as he watches her continue to fall apart. 

 

  
She pulls the blankets up and over their heads, as she presses her sweaty body into his without any of their clothes on. She’s exhausted and her voice comes out quiet and breathy and overly sentimental, every time she says something to him. For instance, when he asks her if she needs to use the toilet before she falls asleep, she dreamily tells him that all she wants is him.

What is frankly miraculous is the way his hand is just carelessly stroking her body as they quietly talk. She’s so exhausted, but she doesn’t want to sleep yet. She doesn’t want to miss a moment of this.

“That was _so_ nice,” she murmurs. “I think I want to do this with you all the time.”

That makes him chuckle — which is also miraculous. “I want to do this with you all the time, too,” he admits.

“Can you believe it?” she asks, yawning.

“Believe what?”

“All of it.” She holds onto him tighter. “Can you believe all of it? I remember when I first saw you. I thought you looked interesting and then told myself to stop thinking of such things because they were inappropriate. I remember when the queen told me I was to give you lessons — and the thought was thrilling because it meant I was going to spend so much time with you. And I remember when you looked at me, at the river, and I wondered about this — and I started to think that I wanted this — from you. And everyone told me it was impossible. But they were wrong. They were all wrong. And I am glad I didn’t listen.”

 

 

 


End file.
